As a student who has grown up in a world only knowing about gun violence in schools, it is quite frustrating seeing that little change has been made to protect us. There have already been 129 mass shootings this year, and of those there have been 13 school shootings, it is no surprise that there is an epidemic of gun violence in America. 

It’s almost like a never-ending cycle, a shooting happens, people pay their respects and express their frustrations, politicians act “surprised” and “disappointed,” and ultimately nothing happens to change this never-ending issue. 

These politicians need to wake up and realize how serious of a dilemma that our country is in. For some reason is so challenging for them to actually accept, they never want to blame the issue on the fact that our gun laws are so outrageously horrible. 

Instead, they always blame it on completely irrelevant factors that “contributed” to the person carrying out the shooting. 

With the recent shooting that occurred in Tennessee, it came out that the person was transgender, and people completely fixed their focus on that instead of the fact that he had killed six people. Children and teachers lost their lives, and blaming it on the gunman transitioning will not erase the fact that there was, once again, another instance of people being killed by guns that shouldn’t be accessible to the general public. 

I feel helpless as a student because there is almost nothing we can do to change this. There have been various walkouts and protests, yes they have gotten attention, but they haven’t caused any big change in this country contributing to our gun control laws. 

Locally, schools within the Denver area have had some walkouts, one for a student who had got shot in front of East high school, and the most recent one of them protesting both the recent shooting at East and also in Tennessee. 

Unfortunately, the first one didn’t cause that much of a change, though, it did garner attention,  but the most recent one which occurred on April 5th caught the attention of Jared Polis. Hopefully, change will be made within Colorado which can cause other states to catch on with changing gun control laws. 

Even when some try to speak out about or protest the issue of gun violence it ends in a punishment. It is well known that Tennessee has been a hot topic these past few weeks, recently three Tennessee lawmakers decided to join a protest that was being held at the statehouse. Which resulted in two of the three of them getting expelled, it was almost as if these lawmakers were being silenced. 

If lawmakers and students are being silenced when it comes to this growing epidemic in America, if constant excuses are being made about these shootings, and if lawmakers continue to do nothing to decrease the occurrence of these shootings, then America is headed down a very dark path.